Çatalhöyük buried its dead under the house floor along the mother's line, and baby girls got five times the grave gifts of boys

Çatalhöyük was a town of mud-brick houses built against each other and entered through the roof. Its people buried their dead in pits under the house floors. A team from METU and Hacettepe University, working for about 12 years with 47 researchers, sequenced 131 people buried in 35 houses and published in Science in June 2025. In the town's early centuries, people buried under one house were often close biological family. In later centuries many people under the same house were genetically unrelated, though they ate the same diet and so probably lived together; the authors point to fostering or adoption. In every period, the genetic links inside a house ran mainly through women. Mitochondrial DNA, passed from mother to child, varies little within a house; Y chromosomes vary widely. The authors infer that daughters stayed in the house as adults and men moved, the reverse of the pattern in Neolithic Europe. Infant and child girls received on average five times as many grave goods as boys: beads, bracelets, bowls, baskets, pigment and blades. Ayça Doğu said, "We were amazed." The authors stop short of matriarchy, and Stockholm's Anders Götherström called the site "clearly something else."